This week we’ve been mixing whitewash for the new old barn. Whitewashing would have been routine in rural dairies fifty years ago. It’s an economical paint of lime and chalk (builders’ lime, and the whiting you use to mark out a baseball field). When you wash it onto your walls, the mixture reacts with carbon dioxide in the air to make calcium carbonate, hardening over a few days. Truly a negative carbon footprint! - whitewash is both cheap and a great green option. It will flake off, and wash off in the rain, if you don’t add to the recipe to improve the whitewash’s adhesion. We also used salt and milk, and tried out a first coat on this chicken coop.
Whitewash will kill or deter microbes, so dairy farmers would have whitewashed the inside of their dairies too. We’ll start on the outside of the barn and see how the recipe holds up.
Dramatically white after half an hour